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by ianstallings 4705 days ago
Eesh

What a horrible title. This is a book about how to program in scheme, not how to design programs. Nothing on architecture or common patterns. Nothing on how to abstract a domain or analyze a problem. Just solutions for common programming a tasks.

Not knocking it but its far from design.

1 comments

HtDP is all about a particularly useful common pattern, recursion and a fairly useful practice, unit testing. It is also somewhat about a fairly useful pattern, templating. Finally, it takes an unpopular stance on a religious issue and asserts that programs should be documented.

The choice of Scheme, makes getting to recursion easier, and allows for it to be free of arguments regarding language idioms - i.e. the Scheme dialect, BSL does not allow iterative looping (Scheme of course does).

The Racketeers have spent careers looking at the process of teaching languages.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/racket/pubs/

>Finally, it takes an unpopular stance on a religious issue and asserts that programs should be documented.

Are these two different issues or one?